🚀 go-pugleaf

>On July 25, 6,000 or more bikers snarled San Francisco traffic for hours.
>Their message was clear: Bay Area residents had better choose what side
>they stand on - highways or bike lanes - or find themselves stranded in
>city intersections at all hours. 

This is block headed nonsense.  It's no way an either-or situation.
People need not ride bicycles.  People need not drive cars.
People need not walk and ride transit.  It should be a matter of
choice, which means there should be room for all transit modes.

But the bike folks do have a point that the car is getting most of
the pie.  If there weren't so many cars on the road, cars would be
an ideal form of transit.  In some places, the same can be said for
bikes -- unless the bikes clog the streets, as the CM folks have so
clearly shown us.

>Following the promising lead of Portland and Seattle, the San Francisco
>Department of the Environment recently released a comprehensive
>"Sustainability Plan," which calls for barring autos holding only one
>person, eventually closing principal downtown thoroughfares to private cars
>and installing people-movers. 

I'd drop the part about one-person cars; that's minding people's
business.  But I do think that portions of congested areas should
be barred to cars, and serviced by people-movers.

>Not everyone agrees. Across the Bay in Oakland, the opening of the new
>Cypress, the most costly freeway ever built - at $250 million per mile -
>was greeted with much fanfare. And San Francisco highway backers have found
>unexpected support in the city's increasingly vocal Asian community.
>Chinatown merchants - angered when the freeway closest to them, damaged by
>the earthquake, was shut down - are now planning a huge parking garage to
>lure more autos. 

Now this is plainly wrong.  The merchants should be funding busses
that run a loop into ChinaTown from surburban transit centers.
Emeryville runs the "Emery-go-round" bus for two major shopping
centers, even on saturday.  It's free.

If cars were not an option, such bus services could even charge a
small fare and still retain their ridership.  Also, the idea of
validated parking could be extended to validated transit tickets.

>No conversation about transportation gets far without someone saying, "But
>in Europe . . ." In European cities, facing a much more critical lack of
>resources, electric cars, pedestrian malls, bike lanes and light railways
>are fast becoming the norm. 

We're not that much different here in the USA, in places like
LA, DC and the Bay Area.  The problem is attitude, and the political
will to start restricting car access.

>Certainly, the lines are clearly drawn. The question is whether San
>Francisco {and in our case the Metro. San Jose/Santa Clara Valley area-
>Marcus} will be able to find a sustainable compromise between the forces of
>pedal power and the lovers of the automobile. 

I don't think it does any good to keep talking about cars-vs-bikes.
That's not the problem.  The problem is too many cars.  Too many bikes

only happens on the last friday of the month.  <grin>